Speaking with Giant Bomb during the EA Summer Showcase, Criterion head Alex Ward explained that the game was intended for the Wii and built to let users create tracks with the Wii Remote. The problem? It wasn’t fun, so they scrapped it. VG247 has the transcription:

“The original version started on the Wii, and it was a user-created game where you drew the road with a wand, and we thought if we made Crash mode you can make it all yourself…

We did that for a few months and it actually turned out to be quite boring. One of our philosophies at Criterion is just ‘cos we’ve made it doesn’t mean we can’t delete it. So if we have to throw something away and shelve it, we could talk for hours about the number of ideas we’ve just thrown away because you get there and it doesn’t quite work…”

What a fantastic philosophy to have! I can imagine that it might be fairly easy for developers to fall into the trap on finishing a game simply because they started it, regardless of how good or bad they think the final product will be. Criterion has it right when they consider the chance that what they’re working on may be crap, and that it might be time to put the old girl down and move on.

What they have now is a Burnout title that’s actually causing a mini-schism in the fan community. Folks would rather the studio be putting out Burnout Paradise 2, a sequel I know I’m dying to see. But who’s to say they’re not working on both? Criterion would be crazy to designate their entire team to a downloadable title like Burnout Crash!, wouldn’t they?